Living in a small mountain village just outside of Tokyo, I grow a crop of indigo every year and process the leaves into dye using traditional methods. I also breed silk moths, raise the silkworms and then reel/spin the silk from the cocoons. The silk is then dyed with natural dyes and finally woven on traditional Japanese looms.
I run several ten-day live-in workshops a year at the old farmhouse here in Japan focusing on the Japanese use of indigo.
Contact me for information.

Edita found this gorgeous old piece of stencilled fabric in Kyoto. You can see soot and soy milk were used to get the grey and soot and iron oxide were painted on for the reddish accents. The background is indigo.

Saturday, 4 April 2015

I didn't know that the Japanese government was publishing these books about Japan. There is an issue on Japanese textiles. You can find an article on some Canadian silk farmer on page 28 of this month's issue.

I've been here so long I am sort of lost at what advice to give travellers to Japan. These books seem to have some good ideas.

The spring ten-day workshops are underway.

Group one left a few days back. The weather was perfect. Everyone got along well. A lot of creativity and kindnesses exchanged. The food was overwhelming with Hiro in the kitchen and on barbecue duty.

We were all honoured to have master stencil maker/dyer Akemi Cohn to drop by for a day and help with netting the stencil homework. She was in Japan for a visit and made the journey out to the house to help. Check out Akemi's work here: Akemi's Website

Here are just a few of the things that came out of the indigo vat during this early spring workshop. Amazing work so early in spring.

About Me

My home is in a vertical mountain village in Fujino just outside of Tokyo. It is here, in my 150 year old silk farming house I hold classes and workshops related to Japanese textiles. Our village shrine dates back 650 years. I’ve dug up dozens of 5000-year-old Jomon-era pottery shards near by. Twenty-one houses are scattered and perched on ledges along a narrow twisting road. Most of the somewhat ramshackle farmhouses designed for silk farming cling poetically to the deep shadows of afternoon. The land reached by the sun was either too steep to build on or was used to grow enough food to survive. From the front of my house I can see well-tended tea terraces ascending impossibly upward. Climb up the hillside and from the queues of tea you can survey my old farmhouse and on extra clear days even spy a self-conscious Mt Fuji.